About Jordan Neely...
This past weekend on the subway in New York City, a 30 year old man named Jordan Neely got on and began to behave erratically. He started yelling at people about how he was hungry and thirsty, doesn’t care if he goes to jail or life in prison, and is ready to die. He then threw his jacket to the ground and was subsequently restrained by a 24 year old marine.
The marine put Neely in a chokehold, presumably to stop Neely from fighting back against being physically restrained, and Neely died as a result of those injuries. Two other passengers helped the marine restrain Neely by holding his arms in place to prevent him from fighting against the chokehold. At no point in the video does the marine strike Neely or take any actions beyond holding him in place with the choke applied.
Normally in a situation like this I would jump straight to the legal argument, and to be clear the legal argument is unassailable. The New York Penal Law explicitly states in article 35 that physical force can be used to defend one’s self or others in the event that the amount of force used is reasonably necessary to defend one’s self or others from what they reasonably believe to be the illegal use of force, or the imminent illegal use of force.
When someone is behaving in an extremely hostile manner, openly proclaiming their lack of regard for sentences (life in prison or death) which only come as a result of capital offenses or other very serious crimes, and then throws his jacket in a manner which conveys his state of rage, it is obviously reasonable to believe that person is on the verge of attacking an innocent civilian. This was why the marine was released without charge following this incident.
That being said, the legal argument shouldn’t be your main takeaway here. That misses the forest from the trees. Alvin Bragg isn’t filing this charge because he has a good faith interpretation of the statute which says the actions of the marine don’t constitute mutual defense. He is filing the charge specifically because the actions of the marine obviously constitute mutual defense, and he doesn’t want people to believe they have that right in Manhattan.
Remember, this DA is a man who reduces a supermajority of felony gun crimes in the city to misdemeanors. He’s tougher on self defense than he is on gun crime. He wants you to be a helpless victim, beholden to the will of the mob.
This has been the end game of defunding the police the whole time. They don’t want to defund the police so that we can live in some libertarian utopia. Why would they want that? They’re communists, they believe in total government control. No, the goal behind defunding the police is to weaken the only institution which is supposed to fight back against the mob, so that the primary vector of force in society is the mob.
You may notice that a Democrat party who once had nothing but bad things to say about the military now reflexively defers to them, to the point where the most prominent landing spots for former FBI/CIA officials are CNN & MSNBC. The anti war Democrat has basically disappeared from our political landscape. That is because the military was not an institution that they controlled in 2003, but it absolutely is in 2023. So they now call you an anti American stooge of the Kremlin if you question agencies and institutions that the left spent the last half century questioning.
The same thing is happening with law enforcement, and it’s a two front war. Defund and demoralize the police until the current members of the institution all drop out, and then replace them with your own storm troopers. Until that transition happens, enable the mob to wreak havoc and devalue the police in the eyes of the community, making them more amenable to defunding them.
Once they have a large majority of the institutions of law enforcement in their corner, you will see the Democrats become the “Back The Blue” party overnight in the same way that you watched them become the party of the FBI/CIA overnight. Once they take over the institutions which they seek to take over, they will rely on the moral authority which that institution has built up in the eyes of the lefts enemies to abuse those enemies under color of law.
This is why every federal police agency has the lefts undying loyalty, despite their efforts to undermine state and local police. The state and local police aren’t controlled by the left, the federal police are. Once the state and local police are, they will get the same level of deference that the federal police get. Until then, Soros backed DA’s will undermine the police by making clear that criminals have more rights than citizens.
There is nothing more evil than this. Conservatives need to recognize what’s going on and leverage the full power of our elected officials and (few remaining) controlled institutions to stop it. That means police unions defying their city governments, it means county sheriffs telling state and federal level officials to stay the hell away, it means defying court orders and enforcing the law as your citizens want to see it enforced. Otherwise you will live under mob rule until you live under totalitarianism.